Los Angeles, California (CNN) -- The saying goes that life imitates art. But that's the last thing you want when you write crime fiction. You never want to see the things you write about mirrored back to you in real life.
But a month ago as I prepared to publish and promote my latest detective novel, "Nine Dragons," I learned of a true mystery with eerie similarities and connections to my story and my research. It has been a heart-tugging reminder that while crime novels may be entertaining thrill rides and puzzles, they also skirt the shores of reality for many.
Before writing novels I worked as a police and crime reporter in Los Angeles. What I saw and wrote about back then became the grist of my fiction. In that case, art imitating life. I took real stories -- a daring bank heist, a conversation with a killer, the unsolved murder of a sports agent found in the trunk of his Rolls Royce -- and turned them into fictionalized investigations in which my fictional hero, Detective Harry Bosch, always won the day.
That was fine. That worked. What was done was done and I could bend the truth and make the story my own in fiction. I think that is the crime novelist's job, to take inspiration from the real world and to turn it back as something that entertains, puzzles and maybe -- if you're good -- even reflects the world back at the reader. To me, there is an art in that.
But this time things have gone the other way. In "Nine Dragons," Harry Bosch is working a murder case in Los Angeles when he gets word that his young daughter has disappeared in Hong Kong. It's every father's nightmare. Harry drops everything, including his case, and flies to Hong Kong to find her. He traces her last known location to a spot in the Tsim Sha Tsui neighborhood of Kowloon called Chungking Mansions. After that point, she has vanished.
Chungking Mansions is a well-known place to many travelers to Asia. It is sort of a modern Casablanca, a crossroads of the world. It is several cut-rate hotels housed in one large and old building, and all of it above a world bazaar where dozens of languages are spoken, and food and other comfort items from almost any country in Asia can be found and purchased. It is the kind of place where Harry Bosch checks his back repeatedly as he walks through.
It is also the kind of place where I checked my back repeatedly when I walked through while researching the book. This was because I had a camera behind me.
Last November I went to Hong Kong and visited Chungking Mansions repeatedly as I made a final research journey while writing the book. Filmmaker Terrill Lee Lankford went with me so he could document my research of the places that would be in the novel. This was so I could refer to video while writing about Hong Kong once I returned home. It was also so he could make small films that could be used to document and promote the book when it was published.
No comments:
Post a Comment